Paris and photography 1850s–1930s
Light writing in the city of light. The National Gallery of Victoria 's exhibition of Parisian photographs from the 1850s to the 1930s testifies to the power of light to reveal, capture and celebrate the diverse faces of this iconic city. Drawn from the NGV's permanent collection, the photographs which comprise City of Light: Paris and Photography 1850s-1930s reflect many of the contradictions and paradoxes that pervade both this luminous city and medium. As we take the opportunity to revisit works by the likes of Felix Nadar, Eugene Atget, Brassai, Andre Kertesz and Jacques-Henri Lartigue, what is striking is their ability to resonate with contemporary photographic theory and practice. Although the exhibition focuses on two key points in the history of photography, the pioneering period from the 1850s to the 1900s and the development of 'human interest' photography during the 1920s and '30s, of greater interest is its ability to exceed these limits and document the complex relations between photography, memory and perception.
Like Henri Bergson's concept of memory and perception as processes of reflection and refraction, these photographs mark a freezing or interruption of the movement of the light with which Paris is famously identified. Although light makes both perception and photography possible, both of these modes of seeing are contingent upon an interruption of light as it falls on objects. As interruptions of the flow of light, photographs, like memories, are destined to remain virtual, partial and fragmented when they return their light to us.' In Lartigue's photographs of the idyllic, pre-war, bourgeois lives of his family and friends, the lightening speed of the camera's shutter is employed to accordingly arrest time and return its events in marvellous